Inside the illusion, Xijiu Ge had been certain the mysterious voice was a provocation, a trap. Her divine consciousness, she told herself, had never truly reached the demon world. Her brothers, teachers, friends — none of them could deceive her. But once she stepped out of that illusion, doubt began its quiet work. Had it been real?
She tried to let it go. The illusion was broken. Everyone was safe. Was that not enough? But suspicion, once rooted, does not uproot cleanly. She knew that. She had always known that. And still, the seeds were in her now, and the past she wanted to return to was already sealed off.
The thought gnawed at her through the night until she could no longer lie still. She left her chambers and came out to let the sea wind clear her head.
She stood at the corridor railing, staring out at the dark waves below, still turning over the words the fantasy world had given her.
If she truly wanted to settle this, she could go to the demon world herself. In the illusion, she had done exactly that — slipped through on a trick and checked the mountain for traces of the sun's divine fire. But this was not the illusion. In reality, she could not simply go. If she appeared in the demon world without cause, the Queen Mother of the West and the White Emperor would demand answers. Xuan Di and Huang Di might be pulled into it as well. And then what would she say? Heaven and the Jiuli people carried centuries of hatred between them. If she wandered into their territory for no visible reason, it would read as aggression. One careless move and she could unravel the fragile peace between gods and demons that everyone had bled to hold together.
The demon world was out of reach for now.
There was one other path. She could go directly to the source.
Ask Li Hanguang. Ask him plainly whether he had encountered a strange wildfire as a child, and whether he had ever seen someone in the demon world who looked like her.
The thought surfaced and dissolved just as fast. She dismissed it. What a presumptuous idea. And what if the answer was no?
Xijiu Ge exhaled slowly, her hands loosening on the railing.
"What is the goddess thinking?"
She startled and spun around. Li Hanguang stood at the far end of the corridor. He had already sensed her mood and stopped on his own, hands open, expression innocent. "I couldn't sleep and wandered out into the mountain. I didn't realize the goddess was here. If I'm disturbing you, I'll go."
She had not sealed Yongtian Palace. She had no authority over where he walked. She glanced at him once, then looked away. "Do as you like."
Another person would have taken that as a polite dismissal and left. Li Hanguang translated it as consent. He walked calmly to the midpoint of the corridor and asked, without ceremony: "It's this late. Why isn't the goddess sleeping?"
"Then why aren't you sleeping?" she shot back.
He didn't flinch. "I dreamed about something from a long time ago. Something from the illusion. I woke up unsettled and came out for some air."
The same, then. She doubted there were many people sleeping well tonight.
Knowing he had not sought her out, she softened slightly. "You were the first of everyone to see through the illusion. How did you know it was false?"
Li Hanguang rested his fingers on the railing and looked out at the churning water far below. A quiet smile crossed his face. "Because it was too beautiful."
His life inside the illusion had been mostly true. The years of his childhood in the demon world, the events leading to Changfu — those had played out as they actually happened. The one difference was this: when he endured two hundred years of torment in Changfu, no divine fire fell from the heavens. No one came to bring him to the celestial realm. Emperor Xuan never recognized him.
At his lowest points, no one came.
And those were not even the darkest moments. They were only the beginning.
He had been born unusual. Ordinary children are carried for ten months. Li Xuan carried him for three full years. It was precisely this that led Emperor Xuan, upon learning his birth date, to conclude that Li Hanguang was a bastard — Li Xuan's child by some demon man. That suspicion, paradoxically, had saved him. It was why Emperor Xuan and Emperor Huang had not killed him the moment he entered heaven.
He was born in an isolated cave in the demon world. His uncles had not wanted anyone to know of Li Xuan's pregnancy, so they arranged for her to give birth there, hidden. Li Xuan herself was too ashamed to acknowledge him. He had nearly been strangled at birth. Li Yao saved him then — and gave him a second life. A hundred years later, Li Yao took it back with her own hands.
After presenting Li Hanguang and securing her position, Li Yao settled into the comfortable life of Chang family's eldest daughter. Chang Ju grew up without hardship or want. Li Hanguang was sealed underground, denied daylight, forced to fight day after day — first against magical beasts, then as a slave, then as a combat monk.
He survived each time. Starving, scarred, stripped of everything, he kept winning through physical skill alone. Chang Yin watched and grew covetous. The so-called God of War bloodline. Chang Yin ran experiments on him, trying to replicate a killing army from his constitution. Every attempt failed.
Then a counselor gave Chang Yin a new idea: Li Hanguang's body was too particular for blood cultivation. But if he were paired with women of various constitutions, and the resulting children taken immediately at birth and raised as soldiers with no identity and no mercy — would that not produce the army Chang Yin wanted?
They thought they were being discreet. Li Hanguang heard every word.
What they had done to him physically, he could endure. This was something else. This was the stripping of his humanity — to be used as a breeding animal, paired with strangers for the sole purpose of producing gifted offspring. He knew Chang Yin was already weighing it. Time was running short. He had to break free before the decision was made.
When his monthly "retreat" ended and he was sent out to accompany Chang Ju, Li Hanguang made a calculated move. He knew he should not take his rage out on her. But every time he saw her — clean clothes, her father's affection, calling him "Brother Hanguang" with complete obliviousness — something in him recoiled. He could not stop it.
Blame her father. She is only Chang Yin's daughter.
He hinted to Chang Ju that she should keep him close and resist sending him back into seclusion. As expected, Chang Yin would not deny his daughter. He allowed Li Hanguang to stay above ground longer. Li Hanguang used that time to perform: letting everyone around Chang Ju gradually believe that he was silently, hopelessly in love with her — too self-conscious to speak, too low in station to act on it. His infatuation, they decided, was dark and twisted and entirely one-sided.
The rumor spread until it reached Chang Yin himself.
Chang Yin had married Li Xuan with a specific purpose: to introduce the God of War bloodline into the Chang family's line and produce an army loyal only to him. But he also understood that in the conflict between heaven and the demon world, raw numbers meant little. A single powerful god or demon could cut through ten thousand soldiers alone. Chi You had matched the Yellow Emperor's entire force by himself at the Battle of Zhuolu. What Chang Yin really needed was not quantity — it was supremacy.
If Li Hanguang loved Chang Ju, then a marriage between them served the same end. Their children would carry both the Chang family's gift for divination and the Jiuli God of War's power. If Li Hanguang behaved, he would be kept as a tool. If he didn't, he would be eliminated. Simple enough.
Chang Yin abandoned the breeding scheme. He would use Chang Ju to domesticate Li Hanguang instead. Li Yao said nothing. She still had Chang Ju. Chang Yin was confident his daughter would deliver him a formidable heir.
With that decision made, Li Hanguang was no longer treated as a consumable. He was given clean clothes. He sat beside Chang Ju and was taught.
For the first time in his life, Li Hanguang had access to cultivation techniques and combat theory. He absorbed everything with a desperation that bordered on ferocity. His progress was too fast. It alarmed Chang Yin.
Chang Yin wanted a dog — one that was obsessively devoted to Chang Ju and obedient to the Chang family, but not too powerful, never capable of turning on its owner. He trained Li Hanguang while simultaneously fearing him. He suppressed and tested him, over and over.
In the long game of survival against Chang Yin, Li Hanguang learned patience. He learned disguise. He buried the lethal edge that had been shaped into him as a killing machine and rebuilt himself from the outside in: gentle, harmless, unmotivated, a man with no ambition beyond his quiet devotion to Chang Ju. Chang Yin disliked sharp teeth in his guard dog — Li Hanguang became soft and deferential. Chang Yin disliked a protector who was too powerful — Li Hanguang became distant from worldly concerns.
He constructed the perfect lackey. Hollow. Obedient. Defined entirely by his attachment to Chang Ju. And at last, Chang Yin — old, calculating, and proud of his discernment — was deceived. Li Hanguang gained access to the Chang family's most guarded inheritance: yin-yang divination.
Divination looks simple. The underlying logic is not. Yin-yang divination was said to have originated with Chang Xi, the Moon Mother, and was considered the most precise of all divination arts. Chang Ju had grown up with it and never bothered to master it. Li Hanguang took to it like water finding its level.
Chang Yin pushed his daughter toward it repeatedly, to no result. In the end, he had no choice but to pass the title of Shao Siyou to Li Hanguang.
Li Hanguang had expected the unraveling of Chang Yin's grip to take thousands of years. Then an accident intervened.
After a series of clashes between heaven and the demon world, both sides negotiated an uneasy peace. The price: Chang Ju would be sent to the celestial realm as a hostage. Chang Yin refused. It was not his decision to make. Under the weight of pressure from all sides, he finally conceded — but not without cost. Unable to let his daughter go unprotected, he placed a heart-eroding poison inside Li Hanguang's body. Li Yao concealed the snake eggs in tea and served them to him herself.
In the end, his role as hostage escort had inadvertently rescued him. Li Xuan's history was not one anyone spoke of proudly. Chang Yin knew Li Hanguang's father was unknown but had never confirmed who he actually was. Had Chang Yin known that Li Hanguang was Emperor Xuan's son, he would never have let him leave the demon world alive.
Before the age of one hundred, Li Hanguang had been sealed inside Jiuli territory. He could learn nothing that mattered. But the demon world as a whole was not sealed from heaven. Yongtian Palace — a playground for the sons and daughters of gods — was to Li Hanguang an enormous archive waiting to be opened.
It was only after he arrived at Yongtian Palace that he began to learn the true depth of what supernatural cultivation could be.
And here, he encountered the obsession that would define the rest of his life.
On the first day the demon world delegation arrived at the celestial palace, Li Hanguang felt something stir in the blood as he passed through his father's hall. He looked toward Xijiu Ge.
He had first seen her at one hundred years old. A sphere of golden light moving across a mountainside in the demon world. He had not made out her face — only the outline, enough to know she was a girl. He had thought she was familiar but was not sure enough to act on it.
It was not until he saw Xijiu Ge performing in Yongtian Palace that he knew. That radiance, searing gold. The power behind it that made his eyes ache. He would not mistake it twice.
But she had no memory of him. What had been, for him, the rarest warmth his life had ever held — it had been to her a minor errand, a casual kindness on a day she had already forgotten.
Li Hanguang had investigated her quietly. The account of Xijiu Ge's origins in the heavenly realm was consistent and clear: she had awakened in Yaochi nearly a million years ago, trained at Kunlun and Yongtian Palace. Everyone knew the shape of her life. A goddess of that stature, untouched by the mortal world — how could she have ever been to the demon world?
He had seen her when she was 7,800 years old. The timing was wrong. Her age was wrong. Li Hanguang spent a long time trying to make it fit and could not.
He had moved too late. By the time he stood before her, she already had a fiance.
He buried all of it. Told no one. Spent a thousand years planning with meticulous care — neutralizing Ji Shaoyu, imprisoning Emperor Xuan, dissolving her engagement to the crown prince, closing the distance between them degree by degree. He had reached the bridal chamber. She still had not remembered him.
Perhaps that was all it had been. A small act of kindness in an otherwise ordinary day.
Xijiu Ge listened to him speak. He was quiet, even, unhurried. The words were spare.
But every one of them was drenched in blood.
The scene from the illusion rose unbidden in her mind: his body on the stone table, soaked through. A heap of demon corpses nearby. The stains on the stone beneath him told a clear story — this had not been the first time, and would not be the last. And he described it as beautiful.
She could not picture what his actual life had been. Nothing she had seen or imagined came close.
She had never felt anything real for Li Hanguang before this. He stood against her — opposite her in position, in allegiance — and she had wanted him dead for it. Who he was beneath all that, what had shaped him, what it had cost him — none of that had mattered to her. It did now. She could not look past it anymore.
She thought, with a quietness that surprised her, that he might have walked a different path entirely if anyone had been there to show him one. A boy raised since childhood against beasts and worse — it seemed unreasonable to expect him to arrive at virtue unguided.
She said: "There is a principle in heaven that life has an inherent will toward goodness. There are many good people in this world."
The logic leap was too sudden for him. Li Hanguang blinked. "What does the goddess mean?"
Xijiu Ge considered explaining it further, then decided against it. The thought was too large for a corridor in the middle of the night. She would find the right texts. There were Taoist scriptures that said it better than she could here. She let the subject close and asked instead: "Will you be at class tomorrow?"
"Of course."
"Good." A brief pause. "Stay after the Donghua Jing lecture. I have something for you."
Li Hanguang heard this and concluded, with the calm of experience, that she intended to kill him. She had always been persistent about that. He nodded. "I will be there. Head held high, waiting for the goddess."
The sea wind swept up the cliff and set both their sleeves snapping. Xijiu Ge stood at the railing, eyes on the moon over the water, and said after a moment: "If someone tried to provoke you against someone close to you — would you believe it?"
Li Hanguang's gaze shifted briefly toward her. "Depends on what it is. If it's just character attacks, no. If they can show me something specific, I would look into it myself, quietly."
She raised an eyebrow. "That's someone close to you. Wouldn't investigating them be returning betrayal for trust?"
He smiled faintly. Shook his head. "I would hope my experience is not a reliable template — the people closest to me have mostly wanted me dead. But I have always believed that human nature does not hold up under scrutiny. Suspicion, even unspoken, lives in the body. Your expression shifts. You flinch where you didn't before. Even if nothing was wrong to begin with, the other person senses it and pulls back, and then the distance is real. It is better to ask plainly from the start. Rotten meat cannot be concealed indefinitely. The longer it is left, the deeper it goes. Address it early and there is still something to salvage."
He watched her face while he spoke. She was not moved. He adjusted without hesitation.
"As for returning betrayal for trust — there is no contradiction. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. Being close to someone does not exempt them from accountability, and it does not require you to pretend you saw nothing."
Xijiu Ge's expression eased. The knot she had been carrying since nightfall came loose. Li Hanguang watched the change and noted something unexpected. She had not hesitated because she could not accept it emotionally. She had hesitated because she could not clear the moral threshold. The decision had already been made inside her — she had only needed the logic to stand behind it.
He pressed his thumb absently against his knuckle and turned this discovery over in silence.
She had made up her mind long ago. It was the weight of every scripture she had been raised on that had stalled her. Now that someone had laid out the reasoning clearly, she set the burden down and did not look back.
The hour had grown late. The wind off the sea had turned cold. With the weight gone from her chest, Xijiu Ge straightened and gathered her long hair back from her face. "It's late. I need to return to Chonghua Palace and sleep, or I won't have the energy for class in the morning. Stay and enjoy the moon, Shao Siyou. I'll go first."
Li Hanguang turned, smiling. "Walk safely, goddess."
She moved away from him down the mountain corridor, the moonlight falling across the water on both sides, her plain robe and dark hair catching the wind. He watched her go without moving.
She reached the far end of the corridor. Her steps slowed — barely, almost not at all — and the wind lifted the white hem of her skirt and the black sweep of her hair like ink dropped into water.
Xijiu Ge turned, just slightly, and asked: "Have you seen me before?"
Li Hanguang read the question as a test. He arranged his face into pleasant surprise, perfectly calibrated. "Does the goddess mean our first meeting in Xuan Palace?"
A short pause.
She did not answer. She gathered her skirt and walked on toward Chonghua Palace without stopping again.
Xijiu Ge: Don't leave after class. Li Hanguang: She wants to kill me. The crowd watching: Class... is this a school romance?